Monthly Archives: January 2012

Nightingale is flying higher than it ever has before! This is the first of many more updates, where we want to let you know what’s going on in the project, and how you can get involved! We’re going to try and post bi-weekly, if not every week – so subscribe via RSS, or just check the blog regularly!

Student Developers Joining the team!

We’re especially excited to have several students joining on the project for their studies, and they will be working with us to make Nightingale even better! More specific details about what they’re up to will come along in further updates.

New Add-ons and Themes!

Our developers and community members have been working hard, porting some of the themes and add-ons you know and love from Songbird…on top of that, many new add-ons are being created specifically for Nightingale. Of note is the currently in beta system themed skin, which uses the default skinning style of the system that Nightingale is running on (GTK, Windows, Mac themes). You can see all of them on the wiki page.

Featherweight – A PHP Based Add-ons Platform for Mozilla Products!

We’re currently developing a lightweight add-ons site based on PHP/MySQL using the CodeIgniter framework. This is a result of the fact that the Mozilla add-ons platform, while complete and good, can’t run on our host’s server, and it is a little bloated for what we’re doing – it’s like buying a bathtub when you really can just use a small basin. If you’re interested in helping out with Featherweight, check out this git repo!

Git Branches!

Allow me take the time to explain our git repositories and branches – and please take the time to read if you plan on helping with development:

nightingale-hacking is our main client development repository, forked from the original Songbird source and written in XUL and C++. It currently houses 4 branches:

master – The main development branch, master is our ongoing work to port the current Songbird trunk from SVN to use Xulrunner 6

nightingale-1.8 – The current release branch, which we released our preview builds from. This is the original code from the first Songbird fork for Nightingale, with many enhancements and bug-fixes. If you want to build your own Nightingale, this is the repository you should use.

sb-trunk-xul-1 – In an attempt to foster development for our future versions of Nightingale, we’re working on a Songbird trunk based build using the old XULRunner 1.9.2 …this would be essentially a re-branded Songbird, with our bug-fixes and enhancements (such as system library use on Linux), meant to be a preview to our XUL6 release.

xul-v9.0.1 – This is the development branch for our far future release, after the release of a XUL6 based Nightingale. It will eventually be merged into master once it is stable and working…but that will have to happen only after the conversion to XULRunner 6 is completed.

ngale-deps is our repository for the XULRunner dependency. Currently, we don’t actually build any of the dependencies as Songbird’s work fine to build Nightingale, but with the XUL6 onward releases, we’ll have to build our own dependencies for building and shipping Nightingale. It has branches for each version of XULRunner we’re experimenting with at any given time.

nightingale-addons contains what will eventually be the source for Nightingale developed extensions, specific to the Nightingale project, written by the Nightingale development team.